Batting on a window on the south side of the house is the first thing I hear as Mountain Standard Time light wakes me at 6 a.m. I get up to investigate. It turns out to be an anxious gray flycatcher, trying to get in. I don’t know why. I turn from the flycatcher to the mountain and notice a shower lifting as clouds redden to the east. I think maybe I’ll return to bed but encounter a rainbow to the north. This is all too interesting to go back to sleep.
Always good to see the sun light the tree after topping the eastern ridge — from the safe quiet of my home. But I am reminded by the news how dangerous every morning is for the folks in law enforcement. Good luck and best wishes to all on this bright Sunday.
I can always stop to listen to this John Williams piece. It’s called “Air and Simple Gifts,” and you will recognize it from the first Obama inauguration. This performance is by Anthony McGill (clarinet), Itzhak Perlman (violin), Yo-Yo Ma (cello) and Gabriela Montero (piano)
For all the boys and girls in Congress, here’s some alternative perspective for today’s negotiations on the shutdown and debt-ceiling stuff.
And while I know many human issues are at stake, I want to point out this story by Journal science writer John Fleck about the effect of the shutdown on migrating Sandhill cranes.
Marla Brose/Journal
In my “monarch of all I survey” mode, I tend to think of myself as the first to hear — after my dog — the cranes coming down river. But apparently I missed them this weekend. Someone Tweeted their flight.
My late Sadie, a St. Bernard and perhaps bird dog mix, was particularly good at alerting me to the cranes coming to the north end of the Sandias to catch a late afternoon thermal for the ride down to the Bosque del Apache. Cooper has been just as good, but, heh, it’s the digital revolution and we’ve been beaten to the punch on Twitter. Just more help in knowing when to look up, I guess.
So far, it’s a day of recovery after another week in the newspaper biz.
Check Twitter for what’s on my radar: that cyclone approaching India, for one thing. And I am still moved by this story about Malala Yousafzai in the Washington Post, particularly her words: “I am proud to be a girl, and I know that girls can change the world.” The White House moved this photograph of her meeting with the Obamas on Oc.t 11.
I’m having trouble paying attention to the rhetorical back-and-forth in Washington. Jay Carney used the word “constructive” after the president and speaker spoke on the phone Friday. That seemed to have resonance for all of a few hours. John Harwood said on a recent Gwen Ifill show on PBS that the brinkmanship and pouting would go on right up to Oct. 17. I guess I’ll take a deep breath today and try to start taking it seriously again tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the iPhone shot in the upper left hand corner is what I’m seeing in my unfocused gaze from home in the hills: nothing but blue.
And now, I think I’ll take some time to read some Alice Munro.
Cooper, after our morning stroll, is already stretched out for a Saturday nap.
— “For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,” she told The New Yorker in 2012. “Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that ….. I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.” — Alice Munro in the New York Times upon learning she won the Nobel Prize for literature.
— Mark Oswald reports in the Journal on the big change in public access policy at the Valles Caldera National Preserve
in the Jemez Mountains: “The board that oversees the Valles Caldera voted recently to allow hikers to wander as they like around the spectacular 89,000-acre preserve in the Jemez Mountains – a dramatic break from the restricted and regulated access allowed previously.”
— Sun comes through the northeast window. I stir. Cooper, the former animal shelter guy, hops up onto the bed and extends a white paw, as if to affirm that we still have a deal.
I’m burned out on TV.
America’s Cup, then “Breaking Bad.” The screen can’t take this much of my time.
I want to get my feet back on real ground, focus on a long, blue horizon.
Back to books and babbling to the dog.
I need a break before the World Series and the National Finals Rodeo. I’m not sure I’ll be recovered even by then.
I’m afraid the zealotry of Congress is still going to demand my attention, but I can at least read about it instead of watch.
And I’m afraid Congress is real — not fiction, not sport.
Meanwhile, my friend Larry Calloway has been off on a real road trip, not watching TV, way ahead of me as usual. Here is his report: “The Grass and God in America.”
The parade of black-eyed Susans in the creek bed is the parade I should have been following today. Instead, I’ve allowed satellite TV and Twitter to invade my brain, leaving me with a headache and a digital quiver.
I thought I should better understand “Breaking Bad,” having not watched it until nearly the series’ end. It’s been shot in Albuquerque, after all, and I remember a few years back when it lit up the ridgetop above me while filming at night in Placitas. There’s been a lot of talk about it in the office for years. Then I read a Forbes’ piece that compared its 62 episodes to a Russian novel and got really curious: “Why ‘Breaking Bad’ Is The Best Show Ever And Why That Matters.”
I stayed up until 3 a.m. today, watching five shows from the last season. I was left wondering whether the best fiction writing and story-telling of the day is going into television productions. And even I have begun to think my attention span might be adjusted in the digital age to 90-minute bursts.
I take back my hasty and ill-informed comment a while back, after watching just one show, that it seemed long on ponderous camera work and short on story. I now am in awe of both. Congratulations, Vince Gilligan. I’m still trying to figure out what train that was that just blew by.
I will watch the series’ finale tonight. It’s hard to imagine the end breaking well, but I will be disgusted if Skyler is any more victimized. Maybe I am stepping in another hole, but Anna Gunn’s portrayal of her in “Fifty-one,” the fourth episode of the fifth season, moved me to her side. I am rooting for her and a survivor’s tale.
Gilligan impressed me again this morning when, reading a profile of Bryan Cranston in The New Yorker, I encountered this description of how he (Gilligan) shaped the Walter White character: “a good man beset from all sides by remorseless fate.” I wish I could define characters as concisely.
So, this perennial slow learner is catching up with the rest of the world. And it feels like a train wreck — at least in terms of my time — that I have simultaneously started to wiggle my toes in the deep waters of Twitter.
Back out into the fields of fall flowers for now. But even out there, I am slightly confounded. Why do the black-eyed Susans crowd the arroyo and the Perky Sue’s stick to the road? (They look almost alike. And don’t the Perky Sue’s usually come in the spring? September deluge at work?)
Too many digital signals running through your brain will make you grumpy, you see. No question, though, that fall is the best season of all in New Mexico and things are exquisite today, even it they aren’t on TV.
I’m not even going to get into politics in Washington in this Sunday thought parade, although with U.S. House bomb-throwing in mind I posed the question earlier on Twitter: “This weekend’s scariest show: Breaking Bad or Congress in action?”
Meanwhile, in case you haven’t seen the latest New Yorker cover, “Bad Chemistry” by Barry Blitt, check it out here.
In the news this Friday, Sept. 27, 2013 morning:
Climate change: Scientists can now say with extreme confidence that human activity is the dominant cause of the global warming observed since the 1950s, a new report by an international scientific group said Friday. Calling man-made warming “extremely likely,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used the strongest words yet on the issue as it adopted its assessment on the state of the climate system.
Obamacare, defunding: Three polls released this week confirm that Americans oppose defunding Obamacare — even though the polls also show dissatisfaction with the law. (CNBC, Bloomberg, New York Times-CBS).
Iran and nuclear weapons: Later Friday, President Barack Obama spoke by phone to the president of Iran about Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. This was the first conversation between the heads of the two states since 1979.
And catching up on magazine and website reading:
Forbes magazine piece on “Breaking Bad: ” “Why ‘Breaking Bad’ Is The Best Show Ever and Why That Matters”
And an interesting Daily Beast piece on Twitter and the Internet: “In Defense of Jonathan Franzen”
dream ranch 